No snappy strapline, sorry

Good day my good friend.

I can only start this newsletter by saying well done to Julia Coonan, Lucy Prismall, and Liani Baglietto Castellares. Your presentations last night for the Transport Planning Society Bursary were amazing and the work that you did really was of the highest quality. As for the outcome…my lips are sealed. In the meantime, you will just have to live with these articles.

James

Government plans for Enhanced Partnership’s hit a hard wall of reality

On Tuesday, the UK Department for Transport issued a letter to local authorities and bus operators that effectively postpones a key part of Bus Back Better. Local authorities now have until the end of April to submit a draft Enhanced Partnership to the Department for Transport, rather than an agreed partnership by the end of March.

No reason has been stated for this, but the current flux in the bus industry really hasn’t helped I would wager. Trying to change all aspects of an industry quickly is hard, and cannot be rushed at the behest of political leaders. Well you can, you just can’t do it well. But this is more a change postponed as a changed cancelled.

How far you walk to public transport depends to some degree on the size of place you are in

Anyone who has done anything in public transport know the general rules of thumb for walking distances for accessing stops. Usually a mix of 5 minutes, 6 minutes, 400 metres, 500 metres, or even 800 metres. But research across different cities in Norway revealed the significant variances in distances, but also this interesting nugget:

Walking distances to local public transport stops increase with city size.

The study offers a very mixed picture on why this is so, with the distance walked at the ‘work end’ of the trip seemingly throwing a spanner in the works (people walk further at the work end than the home end). I wonder if this is a factor of service levels at stops, where busier stops in bigger cities attract more users from further away. But I am not sure. Any thoughts?

You can’t nudge your way to behaviour change

Over Christmas I managed to take a look at the new book Transport for Humans. I highly recommend you all read it. But also a slight health warning. Nudge is mentioned a lot in the book and as this article in The Conversation shows, nudge as a behaviour change mechanism has its limits.

Laurent Franckx published a really excellent article on how nudges can be useful to transport policy making, which I highly recommend you read. This research into nudging for sustainable behaviour in Sweden may also be of use. As with most things, know what it is good at, know what good analysis looks like, and know what it can’t do. Sometimes nudging isn’t enough, you have to barge.

Random things

These links are meant to make you think about the things that affect our world in transport. I hope they do just that.

• A Digital AgriStack Could Help Farmers Access Services. Here’s Why They Aren’t On Board (India Spend)

• Why are China’s Gen Z women rejecting marriage, kids more than their male counterparts? (South China Morning Post)

• How has the design of HDB homes in Singapore changed over the years? (The Straits Times)

• UK government sued over ‘pie-in-the-sky’ net-zero strategy (The Independent)

• Ditching the hard shoulder proved too hard a sell to MPs and motorists (The Guardian)

Something interesting

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Read this post on the Policy@Manchester blog on platformisation of transport services in response to COVID-19.